Well, hey there! After a two-week hiatus due to being in New York and then at NICAR in Orange County (I thought it was LA and it turns out I’ve been lying to everyone), I am back, kind of! When you read this I will hopefully be wandering around Paris, but I felt I owed you all and so I wrote this IN ADVANCE. What! Brief write-up of NICAR here but I want it noted that I met some very excellent people while I was in the US too. If that’s you, 👋.

Soundtrack to this week: Depeche Mode (OK, it’s only one song, but it’s the best version of the best song - you lucky things)

This is a really good story hard-won by going through a lot of data. For the non-Brits among you, it’s a big deal because Right to Buy was a Thatcher policy designed to help council tenants buy their own homes. They could buy at a huge discount, and was never designed to just help people earn money off a property. So… yeah.

This is a very cool exploration of inequality by places (coffee shops, museums, schools) as opposed to areas. It’s only been done in Boston so far, but researchers are hoping to broaden it out to other cities.

Sometimes you see a thing that you feel like you ought to dislike because it completely disregards convention, but… It somehow just works. This Washington Post feature about fentanyl deaths is a great piece of work on a terrible situation in the US. About halfway down there are small multiple charts that create a map. I think I have seen people attempt to do this before but with this data it’s really effective.

This is a fairly simple piece about how different cities grew and spread over the years to become what they are today. Railways and roads have helped in different ways. I just love how pretty and mesmerising these are.

This is somewhat reassuring ahead of the European elections in May. Other than Salvini in Italy, it seems there’s little appetite for populism across Europe. Nice stat: “Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, there’s been an average 8.5-point increase in the share of people saying EU membership is a good thing.”

This visualisation allows you to explore “the DNA of a good government” by looking at different views of the same data for lots of countries. There’s more to it than meets the eye (you can change the scatterplot axes, click on the countries to get individual data points, etc) but am mostly flummoxed by the ranking given that Liechstenstein doesn’t have much data and is… top?

Oh, I like this a lot. I don’t speak two languages (just stupid phrases in about seven) but I know a few polyglots and sometimes there are untranslatable emotions or feelings, and I think this does a good job of ‘mapping’ them. My favourite Welsh words are almost untranslatable: Hiraeth and cwtch.

Genuinely can’t remember where I got this from but this is helpful if you want to test your colour palettes out on a data vis or some other image you’re making. It has different types of colour blindness in there too.

Lastly… A quick note to say that if you are a Tableau user then you may want to enter into the Iron Viz Europe competition. For which I am a guest judge! Get your entries in before April 7th. I’m excited to see what people come up with.

A weekly newsletter with anywhere between 10 and 20 links about data journalism, data visualisation, and storytelling, curated by a British data journalist and nerd. Expect politics, statistics, society and culture - all through the frame of data... With a dash of whimsy.